Cloud Research

Clouds are created from water droplets and are a mass of liquid hovering in our atmoshere. Although most people already have a good understanding on how clouds work and look like its easy to just you play as a cloud, and people will know what you mean and can guess roughly want it is about. I feel that’s it is important for me understand more about how clouds work and how they affect weather and studying the different types of clouds to help improve my game.

As my game is based around the concept of a cloud saving plants by raining on them and using different weather to protect against enemies that might harm the plant. Learning about different weather created by clouds will help me know what i could use for potential 'attacking/defensive' moves and interactions. It will also keep the concept realistic rather than creating ability’s and moves when there are many different ways clouds affect the weather.

Nephology is the study of clouds in science which is a form of meteorology, people are keep to learn about how various amounts of clouds are formed and they effect they have on weather. There are three forms of clouds were established by Luke Howard. He categorized the forms and appearance. The system was adopted until 1929 by the international Meteorological Commission.

Stratiform: Continuous sheets of layed clouds

Cirriform: Detached and Wispy clouds

Cumuliform: mainly detached and rolled, heaped or rippled.

These were later then put into two classes based on hight of the clouds

Cirrocumulus and Cirrostratus. Clouds that were always at the higher level were giving then name cirrus. Nimbus the most popular known cloud name was given to clouds that created the most amount of rain. Nimbus was then later changed to Nimbostratus to label 'Rain clouds'

‘Nimbo’ is the Latin world for 'Nimbus' Nimbostratus clouds are generally grey and are a formless layer of cloud that spread over large areas. The bottoms of Nimbostratus clouds are usually dark at the base of the cloud due to the rain allowing less light though. Nimbostratus clouds are known to be in the middle section layer of clouds and usually are around 6,500ft in the atmosphere.



http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/images/nimbostratus3_small.jpg

Different Clouds creating weather:

An artical called 'How do clouds affect earth’s climate?' talks of how on sunny days lower level clouds block light which in a small way helps lower the temperature in a similar way you could feel a small change of temperature when stepping in shade.

The article also talks about how high clouds in the atmosphere keep in heat from escaping thus keeping the earth warmer than it should be. These effects change the temperature on a small scale but over the world changes the temperature overall on the world. Relating this to pollution the problem is that clouds are collecting thick amounts of Carbon Dioxide which are thinking the clouds. With high clouds thinking it’s increasing the amount of heat being let out of the planet. This could be used in my game as an ability to control temperature.

Obvious weather created by clouds is rain and hail from large amounts of water-vapor that gets deposited and other weather less related to clouds. With a large mix of hot and cold air tornados are created and clouds form in and around the moving pressure, Tornados are seen as clouds as the pressure forces water vapour down. Again tornados could be used as an attacking or defending method in my concept as they already are known for their power of effecting the landscape.

Thunderstorms and Lightning as well are caused by positive and negative charges from rising water droplets and falling ice crystals. As they clash they create Grauple and ice crystals with the ice crystals then carrying and depositing a positive charge it creates a large need for negative charge, with falling positive charge and rising negative charge the combination creates lighting.

Cloud seeding was something new i have learnt as experiments to change the amount of rain in the clouds, planes carried chemicals such as Silver Iodide and Dry Ice to help the process of the cloud, the idea is to make the chemicals absorb the water vapour to become heavy and fall as water droplets. This would allow areas will low rainfall to use the small clouds that pass by to create rain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbostratus
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/wxfacts/Nimbostratus.htm
http://news.discovery.com/earth/clouds-climate.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding